When he fired the policeman was gazing at him, the trained bovine mind eating into the description that he sought to remember, conjuring the facial features even as the bullet struck his chest. From the way the policeman fell Moses had known it was not a fatal shot. That was the moment that he needed to root his feet to the pavement and finish what he had started. But he was running and panting and sobbing to get air in his lungs, frantic to create distance between himself and the man he had failed to kill. The others were at the corner, and when he had come they had all run together till they had not the strength to sprint any further. It was only after he had vomited the early supper his mother had prepared for him, spewed it out behind the bus shelter, that he had felt in his pockets, one after the other, and realized that he no longer had the balaclava.

The importance of the loss had been demonstrated to him with brutal clarity within minutes of entering the militia headquarters. They'd sat him in a chair, in a room at the back and on the ground floor, and a man in a white coat had come forward with a shined and scrubbed steel comb and had run it through his hair and looked with pleasure at the hairs he extracted. There would be a match: they had the skill to do that. It would be no problem for them, to marry what they found embedded in the wool of the balaclava with the hairs that lay between the teeth of the comb. The man in the white coat had said nothing, just placed the comb in a plastic bag. Too simple, and damning, confirmation of what they would already have obtained from the injured policeman.

Sitting in his bed he'd be, with the men around him who make up the photographic imitations of people they are hunting. Moses's 'face' would have been circulated, and the militia men who had come from behind him as he walked must have seen the features that the experts had recreated and assimilated them sufficiently for them to act.